According to recent studies, the light emitted from our gadgets cause sleeplessness. Also, this isn’t the guy from American Gods.

Ever notice how it’s getting harder and harder to get sleep? According to studies, the culprit to the modern day problem of not getting enough sleep is light emitted by our gadgets called Blue Light. Fancy.

What is Blue Light?

“The light from our devices is “short-wavelength-enriched,” meaning it has a higher concentration of blue light than natural light—and blue light affects levels of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin more than any other wavelength.”

Scientific American

In a nutshell, Blue Light, more than any other light wavelength, disrupts our Circadian Rhythm, or the body’s natural clock. In my understanding, it has something to do with blue light telling our system to block the release of Melatonin hormone, which controls our sleep and wake cycles.

Stressors like blue light causes us to change our sleeping patterns. And we don’t forsee shifting of working hours to start by 11am, do we? So you end up sleeping late and waking up early the next morning, feeling tired due to lack of sleep, every single day. As as we know, not getting enough sleep can pose many health problems. Death even. Yes, I am dead serious. Excuse me for the pun.

Did you know sleep deprivation is linked to obesity and produces black circles around our eyes called eye bags. BTW, this is you in the morning.

So what does this have to do with Gears, Apps, Snaps? Are we suddenly shifting to a medical or scientific blog?

For this entry, I am going to recommend some apps and a software that may help you sleep earlier than what you are used to. Cause we all know you won’t stop using your phone at night. Let’s begin.

f.lux® for Windows and Mac

By now we know that blue light keeps us awake at night. Blue light, if you haven’t figured out yet, is a “cool” light produced by the LCD panels of our devices. It’s bluish to white in color. So we need to counter that by introducing warm looking light. f.lux will do it for you, automatically. From the devs themselves:

“f.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.

Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. f.lux will do the rest, automatically.”

It’s quite easy to setup. You can have your location automatically detected (to estimate when is day time and night time in your location), set the light “warmness” comfortable to you and have f.lux set it to warm come night time and back to normal light levels come day time, automatically. Make sure to allow it to run upon computer startup, because you will certainly forget about it. You can also disable it for color sensitive work like graphics design, etc.

You can download f.lux from their official site. It’s also free to use! Wipe off that grin, you cheapskate you.

Most Android smartphones released in the past two years already have “blue light filter” integrated. If by any chance you still own an older Android phone, don’t fret as there are a couple of apps on the Google Play store which lowers or eliminates blue light.

There is f.lux for Android but it requires root (jailbreak for Android). I personally used and recommend Twilight by Urban Android Team. They do the same thing, I just like the UI better on Twilight. There is a free version , which works well, and there is a paid version, to unlock more features. Personally, I stayed with the free version, unless maybe you need the added functions to justify paying for it. There are many blue light filter apps in the Google Play store, so just try out which ever you are comfortable with.

Users of the IPhone 6, 7 and newer IPads has the “night shift mode” going for them. For those with older IPhones and IPads, tough luck as it seems there aren’t any app that implements blue light filtering, system wide. I saw there are a couple of similar apps but only acts as a web browser with blue light filter function. There’s Koala Browser and Unblue (2.99USD). These would have to do for now.

Unsolicited Tip: You can get f.lux for IOS, but only if you jailbreak your device.

There you have it, some apps and a software to help you get more sleep. If you find it useful, please share and hit the subscribe button.